


Soft with a Spine of Steel

by halcyon_autumn



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, I wanted more than what Marvel gave me, PTSD, The story of Wanda Maximoff, Wanda and Natasha are gonna be friends in everything I write dang it, i mean it's pretty light on the PTSD but it's implied, so here it is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-17
Updated: 2015-05-17
Packaged: 2018-03-31 01:38:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3959563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halcyon_autumn/pseuds/halcyon_autumn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wanda Maximoff grows up angry and protective, changes from a girl yelling at protests to a woman who carries the power to rip men and women apart from the inside. This is how she grows up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soft with a Spine of Steel

Let’s tell the story of Wanda Maximoff.

 

Imagine Wanda and Pietro, finally pulled from the ruins of their apartment, dehydrated and starving, smelling of urine and sweat. That’s the story they told Ultron, the story about the grenade that didn’t go off, their parents dying in front of them. I wonder if Ultron bothered to extrapolate or search through records on the internet; would he know that Pietro’s best friend, two floors down, had died as well? Did Wanda ever tell him how her school was nothing more than a pile of bricks? How her favorite teacher had been working late when the attack happened?

 

Maybe they didn’t need to. “We signed up to be experimented on by HYDRA Scientists” speaks rather bluntly of their hatred.

 

So imagine Wanda, ten-years-old, streaked with dust and blood, her clothes ripped with a shaking brother beside her, looking at the ruins of her city. The emergency personnel are running frantically, and the scream of sirens hurts Wanda’s ears. She can hear moaning and sobs and frantic shouting. Wanda and her brother were some of the last pulled from the wreckage alive; most of those who came out after were dead, either from dehydration or because the pieces of stark tech that hit them were more reliable.

 

Years later, when Wanda received her powers, one curious scientist would ask “Isn’t it overwhelming? Everyone’s thoughts and emotions pushing in on you?” And Wanda would respond “it’s nothing new.” This was a woman who had once taken in an entire city’s grief and fear and distilled it into a driving force, a strength of purpose that would never leave her.

 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Wanda and Pietro are still standing on that street.  They’ll stay on the streets, with no family left. Injuries still only partially healed, they find themselves homeless orphans. They learn, slowly. Which dumpsters do you go to for the best food? What kind of people give the most money to a begging child?

 

I bet they made friends on the street. The story they told Ultron was about their personal pain, and that was valid. But Wanda, wonderful Wanda, who broke down when she realized the death and destruction her actions had caused? Who fought the Avengers and turned them inside out, never losing her cool until she realized the effect her actions could have on her people and the rest of the world? This is a girl who grew into a woman focused on the effects her actions had on other people. I think she made friends. And when Hydra scientists wheeled her into a dark operating room, I’m willing to bet she thought of those people nearly as much as she thought of her parents. Steve was right when he said they were fighting a war. You remember the dead after a battle, but you bleed for the sake of the living.

 

So let’s give her a supporting cast for her childhood and teen years. Liza, with her bushy hair and slightly crooked nose, another orphan who stole books and lent them to the twins. Dannika, a grumpy shopkeeper who sometimes had Wanda run errands for her and always tipped better than her dour attitude would suggest. Vasek, a shy boy with curly brown hair who smiled at Wanda one day when she was sixteen. Wanda had smiled back. Pietro had laughed when he found them kissing in an alley a few weeks later. It hadn’t lasted long, but Vasek always nodded at her when they saw each other. Pietro would make faces at him while Wanda elbowed her brother. Then there was Pyotr, an old man who had once known their mother and pretended not to notice when they slept in his shed during rainstorms.

 

Wanda Maximoff grew up angry. She lived through the fall of Yugoslavia, watched Sokovia try to rise and have its future siphoned away by other countries. Wanda started to talk about injustice and imperialism, about the exploitation of developing countries to anyone who will listen. She and Liza read political theory, sometimes stealing more books to understand the terms they didn’t understand. She wouldn’t have loved the Avengers even if Tony Stark hadn’t been among their number; a group of people focused only on protecting first world countries would never have Wanda’s love. The fact that so many of those countries were willing to financially rape Sokovia doesn’t help either. When Pietro tells her about a protest on afternoon when they’re fifteen, Wanda was walking out the door before he finished the sentence.

 

Yes, Wanda Maximoff grew up angry, but she also just grew up. She saves tips from running errands and finds a terrible-paying job. She and Pietro saved up for a crappy flat and lived together, working long hours and eating their own burned cooking. Wanda met other boys and smiles at them and kisses them in alleys. But she also met men and women with the same anger heavy on their tongues that she had. By eighteen she was having political discussions in one bedroom flats and in dank streets. Pietro was nearly always there too. He was quiet during them, and sometimes people thought that Wanda has dragged him along. Those people were wrong; when did speak, he was twice as sarcastic as Wanda.

 

But she also met people _without_ that anger. Wanda knew plenty of people with no opportunities, and none of the rage that drove her or Pietro. They moved through their lives with, at best, no sense of direction. At worst their lives were downright hopeless. She saw them on her way to work, eyes on the street.. The people who had given up. Wanda could have looked at them and seen weakness or cowardice, but she didn’t.

 

When HYDRA found the Maximoff twins, they didn’t promise unbelievable power or revenge. They looked at Wanda and Pietro Maximoff, yelling at a protest but taking the time to help a little girl find her way home afterwards. A few days later they pulled the twins aside and said “we can help you protect these people.” What HYDRA didn’t realize was that Wanda’s smile concealed the thought _You’d better_.

 

The Maximoff twins were not idiots. They knew what HYDRA was. Wanda knew that her hopes and dreams were going to outgrow HYDRA, and the fallout might be violent. When she finally woke up after the operation and learned what she could do, she smiled at Pietro. The two of them could do it, she thought. They could demolish HYDRA, which would eventually grow into a threat, another force trying to use her people. If and when the Avengers came, she could rip them apart from the inside. And she and her brother would stay in Sokovia, let their country and people finally grow into something that the people themselves were proud of.

 

It didn’t go exactly as planned.

 

After everything, battles off the Ivory Coast and the terrible realization that she’d created a monster, Wanda ripped out Ultron’s metallic heart. It was a dramatic moment that Pietro would have loved. She understood the futility of killing a single robot, but it felt vicious in a way that gave her some sense of power. Then, as her hometown grew closer and closer to destruction, Wanda simply waited. _Maybe I deserve this_ , she thought as buildings crumbled and she struggled to breathe through the dust and thin air. _I caused the creation of a robot that wanted to destroy all of humanity. People are dead because of my choices, some of them people who didn’t deserve it. I did what I could to stop it but it might not be enough. Maybe this is how the universe balances itself._

_Maybe I’ll see Pietro again._

Natasha mentioned it to her later, after they buried Pietro. The redheaded assassin walked up to the morning after the funeral in Avenger’s Tower. Wanda was staring at a cup of coffee, uncertain of what to do. She hadn’t ever expected to be sitting in a building that Tony Stark owned, drinking Tony Stark’s coffee. She hadn’t honestly expected to live this long.

 

Natasha settled herself onto the stool across the Wanda. “Why didn’t you try to leave when you knew that staying would kill you?”

 

Wanda stared. “What?”

 

“You can fly. Why didn’t you leave?”

 

Wanda shifted uncomfortably. “I wasn’t sure that I could fly. I’d never tried. I just – I mean.” Her accent felt thick and heavy on her tongue. Her very voice seemed a testament to how little she belong here.

 

Romanoff gave her a look that could have made a grown man piss himself. _Have you ever tortured someone in your life, or did you just look at them?_ Wanda wondered. Romanoff was still staring at her.

 

Wanda broke. “I thought that it was the right thing to do.”

 

Natasha raised a single red eyebrow. “You thought that dying was the right thing to do.”

 

“I deserved it.”

 

Natasha turned and stared out a window. Wanda had been trying to avoid looking out the window; the view made her dizzy. Finally, the redhead turned back to her. “You made a bad choice.” Her voice was gentler than Wanda expected, but still not quite gentle. “There were consequences. You don’t get to skip out of facing those consequences by dying.”

 

“I had fixed everything that I could,” Wanda whispered. “I’d saved people and stopped robots and I couldn’t think straight and everything was my fault in the first place.”

 

She half-hoped that Natasha would tell her that it wasn’t her fault, that Stark was exactly the sort of person you’d expect to inadvertently build a genocidal robot. Wanda wouldn’t have believed, but she longed for someone to give her an emotional escape route. Instead Natasha shrugged. “I’m not going to sit and discuss blame with you. You can decide what’s your fault and what’s not your fault on your own.” She tapped her fingers on the counter. “Why did you sign up for the experiments with HYDRA?”

 

Wanda blinked at the non sequitur. “What?”

 

“Why did you sign up? And don’t tell me it was just for revenge on Stark.”

 

Wanda could bring herself to look at the woman across from her. When she spoke her voice was barely above a whisper. “I wanted to protect people.” It sounded so stupid now.

 

Natasha nodded, a sense of satisfaction about her. “I’ve motivated myself to survive with far less noble motives. Whatever you’ve done, you can do good things now. Keep protecting people.”

 

Wanda could live for that.

 

She held onto that anger that she’d grown up with though. For the rest of her life people would call her passionate, but she still couldn’t lie to herself. It was anger, pure and simple. But she was angry at the right people now.

 

(Some nights she still woke up, worried that her actions would bring about disaster again or that she was on the wrong side. Those nights Wanda pulled herself out of bed and focused on her breathing until the faces of dead family and friends no longer glared at her from her dreams. Then she would curl back up and go to sleep.)

 

Wanda spent those days with the Avengers finding her place in the world. Not an angry young woman or a HYDRA experiment, but a grown woman who’d taken power to protect others. A Sokovian, with an accent she refused to lose and loyalties she refused to abandon. An only child, waking up to grief that threatened to crush her. A woman who still had the angry tongue of her childhood but coupled it with sharp red light flickering between her fingers.

 

An Avenger.

**Author's Note:**

> I really wished that we'd been given more about Wanda in the movies, so I wrote my ideas about what I think her childhood was like, how she became the woman we saw in Age of Ultron, and why she made some of the choices she did during the movie. Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome! I might add more chapters if I have more ideas about things to add to her story.
> 
> The title is taken from a Jodi Picoult quote. I thought it was a nice way of describing the way that I picture Wanda.


End file.
